User:PoopManPoop/Spider Goat
“They stole my idea.”
“They stole my everything”
Scientists all over the world have for a long time sought a way to utilize the strong spider silk in a better way than to just randomly fly between trees. With their inherent habit of killing each other when nobody's looking, any attempts in the past of producing silk on a large-scale have been fruitless. But it looks like the problem has finally met it's sunset. With his team of researchers, Randy Lewis, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming, has developed a way to splice the spider’s silk-making genes into goats, so the protein can be harvested from their milk. Like all the greatest discoveries of our time, this came about accidentally. "So here we are, testing some goats for normal diseases like rabies and diarrhea, when suddenly a dead spider drops on the belly of the subject. I would have just picked it up and thrown it in the dustbin like always, if the new intern Cody hadn't suggested we do something with it. Biologists that we are, all we could come up with was gene splicing, which constituted nearly all of our recreational activities. But fun quickly turned into invention when two days later the goat in question was found to have made a full fledged web around itself, and had started to choke. That's when we realized this could be something big, and started working on it." says Randy about how this came about. In the next few sections we will try to take you through the implications, social and otherwise, of this scientific breakthrough.
History[edit | edit source]
There are traces of experiments having been conducted all over the world from 300 B.C. to as late as five minutes ago to overcome this particularly notorious problem, of spiders brutally murdering and eating each other whenever put in captivity to harvest the silk on a large scale. Only recently some prodigal kids from California unearthed a chamber as big as a normal ship container on a camping trip to Cape Town, South Africa, containing large cages laced with what one of them clearly spotted to be as spider silk DNA. After several unsuccessful experiments to determine the source of the DNA, it was concluded that it was just a coincidence. But still, nothing comes close to the the Thirteenth Spider Count of the year 1996. The idea was to gather spiders in huge numbers, trick them into thinking that it was just a census, and extract the silk. What happened during those two hours is still unclear, but by the end of it seventeen scientists were killed, thirty four injured, two raped and one found hiding inside a nearby gutter, neither of them being able to speak anything. These and countless other experiments and examples related to spider silk spread, if only sparingly, throughout our history, some of them more stupid than the others. But with the recent breakthrough, there might yet be hope.